Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Our family finished up the original Star Wars trilogy on Sunday night, a first time experience for my 9-year old. (Very fun to watch her get pulled into the story, be astounded by the Luke/Leia sibling revelation, etc.) As I mentioned a couple of posts back, the first of the movies came out when I was at the ideal age of 10, so it's not too surprising that Empire and Jedi never quite measured up for me, but I also just remembered that when Return of the Jedi I came out, I had firmly entered the "classical music geek" phase of my life. So, it only just came back to me that I used to refer to the early bit in which Han Solo is unfrozen from the carbonite as the "Glenn Gould" scene; the temporarily blind Han, with hair slicked back, stumbles around with the sort of tortured/ecstatic look that I associated with the late period Gould, whose odd appearance on record jackets always fascinated me.

These pictures don't exactly do the comparison justice, because you really need to see unfrozen Han in motion (ha) to appreciate fully the way in which he seems to channel the greatest of piano heroes. Here's some very poorly transferred video of Han (who knows how long it will last on YouTube?) and one of many available videos of the quirky Gould. [2016 Update: more Unfrozen Han here.] As I recall, Han is at his most Gould-like when he meets up with Chewbacca in the prison cell, but I couldn't find all of that scene online, and this is definitely not worth the time it would take to transfer the video myself. So, use your imagination.

Also, note that just as Han was frozen in carbonite and put on display for Jabba the Hut, Gould has been immortalized in bronze for the good people of Toronto. If only he could be unfrozen...